


The cadence of the hours before dawn

by internationalprincess



Category: West Wing
Genre: F/M, post-admin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-08-03
Updated: 2002-08-03
Packaged: 2017-10-14 00:48:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/internationalprincess/pseuds/internationalprincess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The easy mistake to make, he realizes, is to think that she broke when they left the White House.<br/>She didn't. She'd been disintegrating for years.</p><p>2002 Jeds<br/>Winner - Outstanding Title<br/>Third Place - Outstanding Characterization of CJ</p>
            </blockquote>





	The cadence of the hours before dawn

3:04am

She answers the phone on the third ring.

"I'm growing tomatoes," he says, because it's best to begin with a non-sequitur. Catch her off guard.

"Is that supposed to make me less mad at you?" Her voice is sharp, all razor wire and paper cuts.

"Why would you be mad at me?" he asks, although he's really asking what reason she's chosen today.

"Let's go with your total inability to look at a clock before you pick up the phone."

He wonders if it's wrong to consider such an innocuous choice as a victory. "Were you asleep?"

"No."

"There you go."

"You're growing tomatoes?" Her voice softens a fraction.

"Do you ever sleep?" Pushing his luck.

"During the day, Toby. I'm actually one of the undead. It worked pretty well for eight years because I never had to be outside in the daytime. Now it makes it a little hard to hold down a job."

It disturbs him that he can't actually remember the last time he saw her in sunlight. Even more upsetting that the details of the last time he did see her are falling away. A fuzzy polaroid, her throwing suitcases in the trunk of a cab. He shakes his head to clear the image.

"Are you even looking for a job?"

"I've been writing," she says defensively; the memoirs are always a convenient excuse whenever the topic of employment comes up. For a moment, he wonders if she still writes the way she used to. Ashing Gauloises into an empty tonic can beside her laptop, wearing nothing but a pair of flannel pajama pants. Stretching occasionally to knead the knots out of the pale expanse of her back.

"Writing what? Your long-awaited romance novel?" It comes out sharper than he intended. There's a long silence.

"Go tend your tomatoes, Toby," and she hangs up on him.

Again.

*

1:46am

It takes him fourteen rings to pick up, and she thinks about disconnecting the call twice before he answers.  
"Yes," he says, and it's obvious that he knows it's her. She hates feeling so predictable. Considers hanging up again.

She takes another swig from the beer bottle sitting on the coffee table in front of her. It was refreshing when she opened it, but now it's rancid on her tongue and she wants something stronger.

"There was a report out of Pakistan this morning. The jirga have been at it again."

"I saw it," he says.

Of course he did, she thinks. He probably drew a blue circle around it for her too. Old habits die hard.

She has her own habits.

She spent the morning thinking about how she would have handled the story, and then spent the afternoon throwing things at the television while her successor did it differently. Spent the evening drinking and arguing with an imaginary Toby in her head. Finally she gave up and decided to call and fight with him for real.

"And?" she challenges.

"And this isn't our problem, CJ."

He sounds distracted. Bored, even.

"You don't care?"

"I didn't say that. But there's nothing you or I can do about it."

She doesn't want her sense of futility voiced like this. She likes her powerlessness unspoken.

"I could catch a cab over to the offices of the UN Human Rights Commission. Throw rotten vegetables at the windows."

She imagines he might be smiling.

"Or, you know, you could get a job at the UN Human Rights Commission and actually change something."  
Maybe not.

She's tired of his suggestions. Tired of the way he never sounds smug, never says 'I told you so'. Tired of the professional opportunities that present themselves to her with his fingerprints all over them. He works for the Senate Majority Leader, and too many people owe him favors, want to impress. She told him that she didn't want his help, though she didn't mean it, and she wishes he had believed her.

Neither of them says anything for several minutes. She can hear C-Span in the background from his end of the line, creating a stereo effect with the noise from her own television.

Toby caves first. "What did you eat today?"

"You're not my mother, Toby."

"You're too thin. I saw you on TV. At the opening of that play."

"Salad," she lies, thinking about the half-cold Big Mac that came back half an hour later, "frozen yogurt. What were you doing watching entertainment television?"

What were you doing watching me? she thinks.

"It was an accident," he responds, without a hint of irony.

It unnerves her. She didn't like him watching her on television when it was her job. She likes it even less now, doesn't want his anonymous appraisal. She makes a mental note to decline social invitations for a while. Tucks away the thought that the invitations are a little thin on the ground anyway.

"I was wearing black. It's slimming."

"Camera adds ten pounds."

She regrets it when she realizes they have been reduced to speaking in advertising clichés. He's so abrupt this evening. She wonders for a dreadful instant if she has interrupted something.

"Is this a bad time?" Her implication is clear. He actually laughs out loud at this.

"Is there ever a good time, CJ?"

And the receiver's in the cradle before she can think about it.

She's always the one to hang up.

*

5:45am

"You know," she grouses without waiting for his greeting, "this is what they mean when they say 'ungodly hour'."

"I thought you went to the gym between five and six." He pours coffee into a mug, fidgets with his tie. Glances briefly at the clock on the microwave. He doesn't really have time for this, needs to be in at the office sooner rather than later, but he promised Leo--and himself--that he'd try.

"And yet you called me here at home."

"Are you going to the farm this weekend?"

"Toby..." So much resignation in her voice. Maybe even resentment.

"Because I could fly to New York. We could drive up together." He schools his voice to stay neutral. Just an idea, just throwing it out there.

"I'm busy," she says, too quickly.

"Of course you are." He moves around his kitchen, slides the pad he's been jotting notes on and this morning's Post into his briefcase. Waits for her to say anything.

He tries to imagine her agreeing, tries to picture the two of them in a car together with miles of countryside buffering them on either side from the world. But he can't conjure it in his mind's eye any more than he can make it happen in reality.

"I don't want to go," she says. An unexpected moment of honesty.

"Abbey will want to see you. Hell, CJ, everyone will want to see you."

"Exactly my point."

He sinks to a kitchen stool, stares out the window at the first drops of rain hitting the glass.

The easy mistake to make, he realizes, is to think that she broke when they left the White House. She didn't. She'd been disintegrating for years.

First she became streamlined, professional. Sleek, better dressed. Fighting weight. And then, the moments crash over him in fast forward, the Lydells, Concannon, Rosslyn, the MS disclosure, "relieved," Qumar, her father, Donovan, the campaign. Little parts of her flying away, until she was a sun-bleached skeleton of her former self.

He had thought a second term would be a healing.

He was wrong.

"CJ..." he tries again, but his voice sounds defeated, even to his own ears. He fingers his car keys.

"Not happening, Toby."

He lets out his breath slowly and listens to the dial-tone for a moment before hanging up.

*

11:56pm

She's sitting on the edge of the bath, and the overhead lights are extraordinarily harsh. She asked for a non-smoking room to discourage herself from chaining until her fingers turned yellow. She lasted half an hour before she lit up in the bathroom. The air-conditioning doesn't seem to be working, and so the smoke hangs in billowing patterns, reflected in the mirrored wall. Gorgeous clouds cross her own reflection, gaunt, bent. She exhales, new smoke drifting in amongst the old. She's transfixed by it.

The phone rings, and she reaches for the receiver by the toilet. Doesn't get up from the bath.

"CJ Cregg."

"How did it go?"

"There is no possible way you could have known I was here. Unless you're still utilizing your FBI contacts for illicit and, I might add, highly illegal, purposes."

"How did the meeting go?"

"I mean it, Toby, how did you know I was here??"

"Your answering service."

Her face is even more pinched than usual. She can't seem to stop herself from scowling these days.

"My service doesn't give out that kind of information."

"It gives it out to me."

She sighs, and wonders if it's possible she got behind in her bills again. Thinks about the time she rang the power company to find herself being called Mrs. Ziegler.

"You weren't always so controlling."

He doesn't say it, but she hears it anyway. I didn't have to be.

"How did it go?" For the third time. Patient. Insistent. Never demanding an answer.

"It went." She exhales swiftly, watches the smoke whirl away from her, hit the mirror, return. "I didn't want to work in Boston anyway."

Toby doesn't say anything. It's impossible to discern disappointment from so far away.

"So," she says, "was there anything else?"

"When are you going home?"

"Why don't you call my answering service and find out?"

She replaces the receiver, and then removes it again, lets it hang down the wall. She can do without him calling back. She's capable of most things, but she refuses to compete with his memory of her.

*

4:33pm

The flags at half mast snap in the breeze on top of the building opposite his window. Historically they should be higher, just low enough to allow the invisible flag of death to wave and flap above the stars and stripes. Thirty days, the US Flag Code says, but Toby tires of it on day three. It doesn't work, attempting to temper tragedy with crisp symbolism.

She didn't come to the funeral, which was the final straw for the others, but made a strange kind of sense to him.

"You were conspicuous by your absence," he says to her when she answers, tilting back in his chair, straightening papers on his desk. Listening to the flags.

"Trust me, Toby, I would have been conspicuous by my presence."

He looks up briefly as a nervous temp scuttles in with something for him to sign. He's on his third assistant in as many months, and he'd give anything to be working with someone who wasn't afraid of him.

He'd give anything to be working with her.

It's all backwards. He's supposed to be the one who foundered. The one who got bitter--and drunk. She was supposed to get stronger and brighter. Like a supernova.

They're even in the wrong cities, he thinks. She's never liked New York, and as much as she professes to adore the Soho loft he's never seen, he's sure it fits her poorly.

And here he is in Washington, a city she conquered and made her own, a city that makes very little sense to him without her in it.

"Sometimes," he says, "none of this makes sense to me."

She is silent. He won't elaborate.

The sky outside his window is a pure winter grey. It makes him feel cold just looking at it. Finally the words seem to come to her.

"I think, for eight years, we didn't really exist as separate people." Her voice sounds tiny, far away, child-like. "It was like we were constituent parts of a whole person. You and Sam were the words and the heart, Leo was the brain, and Josh was the hands, the action. I just had to be the face on it all."

There's a long pause. He wants to tell her how she was so much more than that, but he can see she's grasping for an idea that's just out of her reach and it's the most she's opened up to him in as long as he can remember. He holds his breath, doesn't dare interrupt.

"Toby, I think maybe I don't know how to be myself anymore."

His mind races while he tries to think of something to say that won't be wrong. Like trying to talk a jumper down off a ledge.

He takes too long.

She hangs up.

*

2:13pm

She's not sure when it went wrong. Could have been the fact she didn't eat breakfast, hasn't slept properly in a week. Might have been the three glasses of merlot she had instead of lunch to 'calm her nerves'. Not that she was actually nervous, just that the wine seemed preferable to the salad sitting in front of her.

Whatever it was, she couldn't stand the looks on the faces of the fat, balding men around the table, perched too high in an ostentatious building with bad art on the walls.

So, she probably shouldn't have raised her voice, she thinks, as she stumbles getting out of the cab. Damn heels. She pulls her overcoat tight around her, the first snowfall starting to dust the sidewalk. But if they didn't want to hear hard facts, they shouldn't have retained her. Convenient for them she's just a consultant-- key sticks in the lock-- and they don't need to give her notice to tell her to pack her bags.

She hauls an icy bottle of Absolut out of the freezer, noting clinically that it's been sharing space with half a bag of frozen peas and nothing else. Turns up the heating, sinks to the couch, pours two fingers into a tumbler. Waits for Toby's call.

Of course he'll call, she thinks, staring at the receiver. It'll probably take Macpherson all of five minutes to dig out his number.

'Ziegler,' he'll say, 'How the hell did you ever put up with that woman?' Mac will use words like "hysterical", which she doesn't need Toby to tell her comes from the Greek for 'womb'. She hates the implication, has always hated the word.

And so Toby will mumble something in her defense and then he'll call her.

The phone doesn't ring.

She pours another glass, and unbuckles her shoes. Shucks her clothing as she heads to the bathroom, awkward, one-handed, bottle and the telephone tucked under one arm.

She used to have candles in here, she realizes, running the water at an almost scalding temperature. An oil burner. Feminine accoutrements. Now there's just mildew and a pathetic looking bowl of potpourri. She is amazed that dead flowers can actually get worse. Pours herself another glass. There's always lower to sink, she thinks, sliding into the bath.

Her skin gradually takes on a rosy glow, and the water cools. She doesn't have a watch, but the level in the bottle indicates she's been home a while. She shakes the phone. Stretches out the antenna. Maybe it doesn't get reception in the bathroom.

She pushes up out of the water, wraps her robe around her without drying herself. Tracks water in messy puddles across her hardwood floors. Manages to find a poor quality chardonnay in the back of one of her cupboards. Checks the phone is plugged into the wall properly.

She's leaving damp marks on her couch, but she doesn't care. There's nothing but idiotic daytime television on, and she surfs endlessly through the channels, a cycle of infomercials, talkshows, made-for-tv movies. No news. Eventually she clicks the phone on and listens to see if there's a dial-tone, but discards the idea of calling herself from her cell to see if the line works.

The warm chardonnay is sour, and she starts to feel nauseous. She finds a box of crackers and makes a lot of crumbs.

When she realizes that the only light in the apartment is coming from the television, she wobbles slightly as she reaches to click on a lamp. If it's dark, she reasons, it's been hours.

And the stagnant air is finally split by noise.

"I'm disappointed, Toby," she says, without checking her caller ID, hoping it won't turn out to be a telemarketer. "I expected your call hours ago."

"Yeah," he says. Doesn't elaborate, doesn't offer words of comfort or sympathy.

She wants to yell at him, make him understand that she doesn't want him checking up on her. But she feels abraded by his absence, so she says nothing.

"It, uh, it took a little longer than it should have."

She can imagine him shuffling as he says this. Looking down at his feet.

"What did? Me getting fired?" Her voice rises an octave in disbelief.

"No. Me getting here. And it's, you know, it's not that warm. So I was hoping you might let me in."

She spins to face her front door, the phone clattering to the ground. In the next instant she's flinging the door open, and he's there, cellphone pressed to his ear, laptop case slung over one shoulder.

She can't be mad. She can't be anything. She can't even keep the tears inside as he puts his bag on the floor, closes her door gently behind him and pulls her close.

And he's warm, and he smells like her history, and he places his hands on her hips and doesn't behave as if she's fragile. He's kissing away her tears, and smoothing back her damp hair, and he still looks at her as if she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen, though it's been years since she lived up to that.

He makes love to her with both reverence and passion, and he's still whispering to her when she falls asleep.

She wakes to find him gone.

Washed-out sunlight leaks through her blinds, and she stretches endlessly, wriggling free of rumpled sheets.

There's almost a smile on her face as she brushes her teeth.

*

11:44am

He digs around in his coat pocket for the source of the ringing, ignoring the glare an older man gives him over the top of his newspaper.

"Where are you?" she asks.

He rubs a little at his forehead, leans back in his seat. "At the airport. I, I have a thing this afternoon. Otherwise I'd stay." It was agony to leave her sleeping, the sight was remarkable and too rare to interrupt.

He can still feel her hand resting on his chest. It makes it hard to breathe.

"So this plane ticket on my dining table." Her voice is different. It takes him a moment to identify the change, the lack of hostility. Toby wonders if she's dressed. "What am I supposed to do with this?"

He waits while a gate attendant calls a flight over the P.A. "Get on a damn plane, CJ. Come back to Washington."

"And that's supposed to fix everything?" An actual question, he realizes, not a challenge.

"No." She knows this. Nothing will be a panacea. Least of all him. "But you know it's going to be a pretty good start."

"I've lost six jobs, fourteen clients and three assistants since we left the White House. I think the colloquial expression is 'washed up'."

He doesn't contradict her. She doesn't say anything for a while, but her silence no longer frightens him.  
"Toby, what makes you think I can put myself back together any better in DC?"

He thinks about that for a long moment, as a small child chases an even smaller sibling through the chairs in front of him.

"Because you left part of yourself there, CJ. It's as simple as that."

And he hears what might be the most miraculous sound coming through the slightly fuzzy connection on his cell.

She's actually laughing.

And this time, he's the one to hang up.


End file.
